This thesis is the result of work done at the HPC laboratory at the Department of Computer and Information Science (IDI) at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway. The work has been done in collaboration with the Department of Medical Technology at SINTEF in Trondheim, Norway.

I would like to thank my supervisor Dr. Anne C. Elster (IDI) and my co-supervisor Dr. Frank Lindseth (SINTEF, IDI) for their supervision and help in completing this thesis. Dr. Elster is the backbone and driver of the HPC group at IDI and NTNU, and this thesis would not have been possible without the resources she has made available for the students at the HPC laboratory. Dr. Lindseth is a world leader in medical ultrasound, and his knowledge and experience was invaluable during my work. I also want to thank Ole Vegard Solberg (SINTEF) for assistance and very helpful input. Some of the GPUs used in the work was donated to the laboratory by NVIDIA and AMD. I wish to thank NVIDIA and AMD for their support of the laboratory.

Finally, I would like to thank my fellow students at the HPC group for ideas and support, especially my good friend Ahmed A. Aqrawi for his camaraderie and humorous discussions during those countless hours at the lab.

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\emph{Trondheim, June 2010}
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\caption*{Holger Ludvigsen}
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